Nanaimo arrived on a hill. Not the polite incline of Toronto sidewalks but the kind of hill that makes you feel we’re in San Francisco by mistake. Streets as if the town had been poured over a staircase. It happened to be my mother\u2019s birthday and Mike\u2019s. The sort of coincidence that feels mildly significant even if the universe refuses to explain. The show was at The Vault. Friendly in that West Coast way where people talk to you as if they\u2019ve been expecting you all afternoon. The relaxed way of someone who has already survived the anxieties of youth and now runs a caf\u00e9 instead. That was the owner. She had white hair, or maybe blonde, tied neatly behind her head. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Songs and hyperlinks. I made the Eventbrite link, which is not normally part of my romantic mythology of performing but apparently what one does in Nanaimo. My cousin Jane came to the show. I hadn\u2019t seen her in some time. Before we started I told a story about her great-grandfather, which seemed like the sort of thing that should be said in a place called The Vault. Ancestors belong in vaults. I visited the man in his 90s when I was 4 and 5. My dad brought me along as he did the rounds at the old folks home. I was proud of him even though I was only a child. I saw how we breathed new life into the old people. Sometimes they wanted to claim me and I frantically turned to my father to rescue. He wasn’t always as fast as I wished. I liked how he snuck in a corned beef sandwich and a flask of whisky for his old uncle Isaac, a swig and the laugh of the toothless. My middle name was chosen after his deceased wife. Always proudly, my father reminded him my full name was Robert Neil Wiseman, being anglicized from Hebrew Rochmiel Nechem, after two women from Isaac’s life, his sister and his wife, my dad’s mother Rochel and aunt Nechamel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The piano had a dead note. This is the kind of detail that can quietly ruin a pianist’s evening. One key refusing to speak while the neighbors perform like civilized citizens. Nanaimo, it turned out, planned ahead. A piano technician raised his hand like a character placed in the room by a generous playwright. He lifted the lid, used a fork or a knife from the kitchen, the note returned to life, he show went on. Jane sat in the room carrying the memory of a great-grandfather who probably never imagined that one day his story would be told beside a piano that briefly forgot how to sing. But it remembered. Which is really all you can ask of a piano, or a town, or a family story on a hill.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"